The Best Way to Track Site Statistics

What do your readers want? Without knowing the answer, you can’t make them happy. Tracking your site stats allows you you to make adjustments to thrill your readers.

If you want advocates, you need to read this post.

Hits Are Misleading

Tracking hits gives you an incomplete picture. Many of your “hits” come from non-human visitors called spiders. These “bots” collect information for search engines or leave you spam comments. It is important to know how many humans visit your site, what they look at, and why. Tracking hits doesn’t answer these questions.

Comments Don’t Match Traffic

Comments are also a poor way of tracking traffic. I have a page on ThomasUmstattd.com that is my most visited page. It gets hundreds of unique visitors every week. But it only has one comment. I have other posts that get no traffic but have over a dozen comments.

Analytics Are the Key

An analytics package like Google Analytics tells you much more than just how many hits you have. It answers not only “how many,” but also “who,” “where,” and “why.” Here are some popular analytics solutions.

Analytics Solutions:

Google Analytics – Free, accurate, and easy to setup. Google Analytics makes it easy to track the stats for several sites all at once. AuthorMedia Pick!